Lord Mark
Malloch-Brown

Former UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch-Brown has spent his career at the centre of international affairs.

Today Mark is Chair of The Observer, incoming Chair of a leading think tank ODI Global and engaged in a political risk startup that blends human and AI risk assessment, The Unruly Corporation. He combines insights from these rapidly changing worlds of media, Development and politics in his work as a business and board leader, analyst and speaker. He is a prominent adviser on the reform of the international system and holds visiting positions at leading universities in three continents.

A veteran of the changes that have swept our times he has crisscrossed the world from its power centres and financial capitals, to its development hotspots and war zones. He has seen countries like China and its Southeast Asian neighbours transform themselves; he has dealt with the aftermath of genocidal conflict in Cambodia, the Balkans and Rwanda; he has been a participant in the Democratic revolutions of the 1980s and 90s and has seen up close the subsequent backlash and rise of populism on the left and right. He has led major global organisations and founded or built major non-governmental ones.

Today he sees a world at a crossroads. The international rules have broken down and few if any of the post 1945 assumptions about  international affairs hold. We are caught between spiraling forward into a world where naked raw power prevails or pulling back- not to where we were before- but to one where national interest is at least curbed by a recovered respect for co-operation.